AALDEF Protests NYPD's Stop and Frisk in June 17 Silent March

Tuesday, Jun 12, 2012

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) will be joining over 200 civil rights, labor, faith, and community groups in a silent march on Sunday, June 17th (Father's Day) against the NYPD's "Stop and Frisk" policy.

"Stop and Frisk is a prime example of the NYPD's blatant use of racial profiling to criminalize and suspect innocent people," said Nermeen Arastu, staff attorney at AALDEF. "We want to ally with other groups of color, including Blacks and Latinos, to fight for the equal and fair treatment of people of color by the NYPD."

The silent march was first used in 1917 by the NAACP to draw attention to race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois, and to build national opposition to lynching. Ninety-five years later, national civil rights groups such as AALDEF are marching again to protest Stop and Frisk as the number of street stops of people of color in New York City has skyrocketed.

In 2011, NYPD officers conducted 685,724 street stops, a more than 600% increase since Mayor Bloomberg's first year in office, when officers conducted 97,000 stops. More than 4 million people have been stopped under this administration, despite the fact that 9 out of 10 people stopped are completely innocent - meaning that they are neither arrested nor ticketed.

"Wasting our resources on such ineffective policing will put all New Yorkers further at risk," said Arastu.

AALDEF has taken a stand against ineffective NYPD policies that curtail the human rights of any New York City residents, including calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the NYPD's surveillance of American Muslims, and launching Go FOIL Yourself, an initiative to help innocent New Yorkers file Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to find out if they are the subject of the NYPD's illegal surveillance.

"Like the surveillance of American Muslims, Stop and Frisk humiliates and stigmatizes innocent people and chills their day to day life," said Arastu. "We are concerned with the systematic breakdown in trust that the NYPD has fostered between itself and communities of color in New York City."